The next time you see me comin’ you better run” (Bob Dylan, Highway 61)

“A faint cold fear thrills through my veins” (Shakespeare’s Macbeth)

“I want to live, I want to fuck, and not only with one man. Would you marry me?” (The girl to the boy in Fatih Akin’s ‘Against the Wall’)

Blood is a very special sap (Mephistopheles, Faust’s evil partner, says: Sign with blood!). It is mythic. If we loose too much, our vitality, our life is running out with it. Red is it’s characteristic colour, but there are red and white corpuscles in it. I am looking to our flags, the Turkish and the Swiss one. In Switzerland they say about it’s signification: White freedom is emerging from the red ground of blood. Of course they think of the battles of Morgarten and Sempach, where a couple of “Swiss” peasants had the victory over the knights of Austrian Habsburg, and here in Turkey we’ll remember the Independence wars against the imperialist armies of England, France, Greece and Italy. Much blood trickled away then, as it does today in Baghdad.

Blood carries our emotions (a very common word for a young man here is “delikanlı”= madblooder) and it’s following them: in seconds I blush or I get pale like linen. No, you say? Then you might be cold blooded…

But “blood” in general signifies the past, the ancestors, our descent and origins. It contains the informations of our past, like every cell of our body. Our family? Well, our blood-relations, of course. The nation is in a queer way identified with blood. He insulted Turkish blood! said the boy who is suspicious of having shot Hrant Dink….On the other side blood is a liquid we all share as humans. It is red, no matter if we are Scottish, Eskimo, Yoruba, Apache, Anatolian, Armenian, Aborigine or Chinese. In margin of a few blood groups we are able to share it with everybody. It is renewing itself every minute and hour. It is the medium providing our body with everything he needs to stay alive in the future. There should be no more bloodshed, says God to Abraham, who was willing and ready to sacrify his son. But I fear we did not understand him. We talk about “the one world”, multiculturalism, tolerance, the attractions of other cultures etc. We travel to the outposts of the world to admire its marvels (we prefer a “World of Wonder”-hotel with not too much contact with the natives for that adventure). But “when it comes to marrying our own daughter or son, everyone’s preference is marrying them to someone of their own blood. Same religion, same nationality, same skin, same culture. This ultimate fetishism with ‘blood’ is the deepest malady of our times. We don’t have the means to overcome it. “

Emigrants, like for example the Turks in the European countries, try to preserve their language, their traditions, their believings and their outfit more than everyone in the motherland, building an invisible ghetto themselves in their “promised lands” (because why did they emigrate?) And this belief in the “purity of blood” is for long time a big illusion. Can you find any citizen of the USA without at least 1/16 of “negro blood” running in his veins, even if the skin is “white”? Didn’t people mix for centuries by falling in love with strangers? Just look at the names on any West-European house door: You’ll find there Sarrazin, Tekin, Yala, Citton, Schimansky, Müller, Brimelow and Birkin. As far as I know there is Jewish, English, German and Gypsy-blood in my veins. And they did not tell me all.

What to do? We should think about the world – it brings blood to our brain 🙂 and takes it from other body parts, and: As many as possible of us should begin to overcome this “blood fetishism”. No way to insist in purity and “honour”. We should put our human parts in foreground, shouldn’t we?